Issue Two: Luminal Landscapes

SKYLIGHT UPON THE CAVE

PLACE GIVES TIME ITS TEXTURE, and light gives place its form. The same street looks different at noon than at dusk. The same memory hardens or softens depending on who is remembering it. Landscape is never static; it becomes what light allows it to be. In this issue, the writers craft a skylight upon the cave, illuminating the overlooked, the inconvenient, the intimate, the way out.

Landscape is not just a backdrop. It is pressure. It is memory, ablaze. The writing reveals affects, like the bureaucratic sublime, that force a character like Luis in “La elección del naúfrago” to tarry with the corporeal tension between desire and morality. It also elucidates the psychosomatic uprooting of one’s sense of identity, as Steve Pastorino shows in “Born in Caracas,” when he asks himself, “Am I Venezuelan?” For Pastorino, identity becomes geography, mutable depending on who is speaking: mother or son.

The writers in “Luminal Landscapes” do not leave the reader with a concrete resolution, but that is because arriving at one was never the point. The task of the “good” writer is never to inscribe ideology upon the reader, but to widen their field of perception by refusing to look away from the fire. We believe the writers in this issue achieve such a task.

“¡Sólo nos queda el tedio!” writes Elí Urbina. In this era of exhaustion and overwork, this may seem, to some, like an absolute truth. But thanks to art, we also have “las caras de la semana” (Figueroa), “the halo of morning” (Droker), “the hummingbirds” (Clover), “the Pisa house” (Ghazirad), and “the smell that your body [...] remembers as home” (Gamez). These are not volcanic eruptions; they are flickers of light, the mundane made extraordinary. These are the internal landscapes that still carry an ancestral scent. The news that only the artist’s gaze can illuminate. These are the textures of time.

With infinite tenderness and solidarity,
Melissa & Karlié, Editors

February 27, 2026